This thesis studies elite men and women’s uses of Greek classical and early Christian texts in order to provide a more nuanced view of the relationship between knowledge of Greek language and the religious controversy between Catholics and Protestants in the English Reformation from 1516 to 1558. It addresses some of the misconceptions of Greek and its connection to Protestant heresy during the Reformation, while also explaining the ways that men and women used Greek in developing and maintaining individual religious identities in sixteenth century England. This research illuminates the ways that Greek literature, reborn in Early Modern European society, influenced Protestant and Catholic educated men and women as they sought to exhibit dignity in the face of religious persecution.

Les Sophonisbe du XVIe siècle : la première tragédie régulière, œuvre d’un théoricien italien (Trissino), une traduction en prose opérée par le maître incontesté de la versification (Mellin de Saint-Gelais) et par celui qui est considéré comme le modèle de la prose élégante (Jacques Amyot), une seconde traduction en vers alexandrins qui est le fait d’un grammairien (Claude Mermet), voilà un corpus qui ne peut qu’aiguiser la curiosité et susciter l' intérêt. Ces œuvres sont ici réunies sur le modèle des éditions bilingues et suivies d’un glossaire raisonné. L’étude linguistique est centrée sur les variantes et les variations, qu’elles soient graphiques et morphologiques lorsqu’il est question de confronter les deux traductions françaises ou lexicales et stylistiques quand texte-source et textes-cibles sont comparés. Cette étude comparative rend possible le dialogue entre ces textes et entre ces deux rives. Les va-et-vient entre la France et l’Italie semblent aller de pair avec une réflexion linguistique qui se fait par rencontres (officielles ou non), par « combats », par interpénétration du monde de l’autre, de la culture de l’autre.Traduire pour surpasser les modèles et pour illustrer « nostre vulgaire », élaborer une langue pour ne rien avoir à envier aux autres et offrir des œuvres dont le style tente d’égaler Virgile, Homère ou Cicéron, avoir une ̎belle langue̎ et une littérature aux qualités stylistiques incontestables, telle fut l’ambition de ces traducteurs ? / The Sophonisbe of the sixteenth century, the first regular tragedy, work of an Italian theorist (Trissino), a translation in prose made by the undisputed master of versification (Mellin de Saint-Gelais) and by the one who is regarded as the best representative of elegant prose (Jacques Amyot), a second translation in alexandrine verse which is the artefact of a grammarian (Claude Mermet), is a corpus which can only sharpen the curiosity and arouse the interest. These works will be joined together here on the model of bilingual editions and followed by a glossary The linguistic study is centred on the alternatives and the variations, whether graphic and morphological when comparing the two French translations, and the lexical and the stylistic when source and target texts are compared. These analyses show to what extent the evolution of these authors, both in the proper and figurative meanings, influences a language which is still in need of elaboration and codification. The constant moves between France and Italy are paralleled by a linguistic reflexion which is done by meetings (official or not), "fights ", and the inter-penetration of the world of the other and the culture of the other. Translating to exceed the models and to illustrate "Vulgar Latin", to develop a language so that we have nothing to envy the others, to offer works whose style competes with that of Virgil, Homers or Cicero and to have a ̎beautiful language̎ and a literature with undeniable stylistics qualities, was undeniably the ambition of our translators.

From the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries, a corpus of didactic Persian texts circulated across Central and South Asian courts, functioning as a ‘mirror for princes’ or didactic manuals of ethical comportment. Numerous such manuscripts were embellished with meticulously detailed and laboriously created paintings. But what was the role of manuscript illustrations in shaping ethical and moral transformation? Though we now understand paintings through the frameworks of taxonomy and connoisseurship, how did illustrations make meaning to their intended audience, who read the text and were steeped in textual traditions? Contemporary sources are silent on the role of paintings in didactic texts, but, as my dissertation demonstrates, an in-depth evaluation of paintings and their accompanying text reveals how painted manuscripts engendered specific reading practices. These reading practices involved listening, visualizing mental images, viewing paintings, anticipating, recollecting, confusion and wonder, exercising patience, and even stilling our minds – experiences that made the reader-viewer dwell on the manuscript’s contents for an extended period. Focusing on painted manuscripts commissioned and collected by the Qutb Shahis in sixteenth-century Golconda, this dissertation’s chapters explore how writers, scribes, painters, and illuminators deployed allegory, repetition, and narrative plot, to attract and sustain their intended audience's attention.

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Often the Italian Madrigal is associated with print and the public marketplace. Yet it originated in handwritten anthologies restrictively circulated by Florentine patricians. In recent years, print scholarship broadened Renaissance musical studies from composer and institutional analyses to those focusing on material form, usage, and meaning. Manuscript studies of the Italian Madrigal, however, are yet to receive similar methodological expansions. This dissertation explores the social world of four manuscript anthologies of madrigals crafted in 1530s Florence. I argue that they participated in a culture whose practices aligned with and projected the elite identities of their owners, remaining in use despite the advent of printed collections intended for the broad consumption and general tastes that dominated the genre’s dissemination from the 1540s onward. Through the four manuscript anthologies, I present a needed cultural history of manuscript usage and meaning in an understudied era of the genre, examining processes of self-fashioning, communal and diplomatic circulation, notational difference, and political identity. I uncover this information through paleographic, primary-source analysis of musical and epistolary documents as well as historical survey. This dissertation reveals, firstly, patrician use of manuscripts as markers of hierarchical distinction in Florentine society. Second, it concludes that manuscript madrigals should be understood alongside other Florentine manuscript practices of epistolary exchange and personal record keeping, as documents intended to accumulate new works and preserve family history and legacy. Third, this dissertation provides a comparative analysis of the music-notational and paleographic differences between contemporaneous print and manuscript versions of Florentine madrigals in the 1530s. This dissertation then concludes with an analysis of the political decorations within one of the manuscript partbook sets that offers insight into Florence’s governmental transition from a longstanding republic to Medici rule in 1530. Altogether, my project reveals particular ways in which the manuscript madrigal projected the individual and communal identity of patrician Florentines to garner distinction among other social classes, to solidify diplomatic bonds and preserve family history, to encode performance through subtle notation, and to engage with cataclysmic governmental shifts as reflected through the political views of individuals and the scribal hand.

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At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Muslims of the newly conquered territory of Granada rebelled against their Catholic Castilian and Aragonese masters. The Muslims of Granada were subsequently given the choice of expulsion or conversion, with many choosing to remain and convert to Catholicism. Beginning with these initial conversions, the question of Morisco Muslim-ness is one that has historians for years. For many scholars, Morisco religiosity represents a form of syncretic religion that blends both the Catholic and the Muslim in specific instantiations of religious practice. For others, the Moriscos represent a crypto-Islamic community that practiced a form of taqiyya, or the Islamic practice allowing Muslims to conceal their religious affiliation under duress or the threat of death. What these analyses fail to take into account is the performative aspects of Morisco religious practice at the boundaries of Catholicism and Islam. This dissertation intends to look at Moriscos as a suspect community from the perspective of the Spanish state, but also from the vantage point of the Moriscos themselves, who attempted to navigate the boundaries of Catholicism as articulated in legislation, polemical texts, and inquisitorial trials, while framing their religious practice in terms of cultural preservation. Similarly, this dissertation will examine the methods employed by the Moriscos in their performance of an oppositional Muslim identity set in direct contrast to a developing Spanish nationalism. Performance here is being employed to investigate how Moriscos, who represented a “fifth column” for the nascent Spanish state, constructed fluid identities that fluctuated in response to the socio-cultural and/or political context. / Religion

This doctoral dissertation is a paleographic transcription of a Spanish chivalric romance written by Beatriz Bernal in 1545. Cristalián de España, as the text is referred to, was printed twice in its full book form, four parts and 304 folios. It was also well-received outside of the Iberian Peninsula, and published twice in its Italian translation. This incunabulum is quite a contribution to the chivalric genre for many reasons. It is not only well-written and highly entertaining, but it is the only known Castilian romance of its kind written by a woman. This detail cannot be over-emphasized. Chivalric tales have been enjoyed for centuries and throughout many different mediums. Readers and listeners alike had been enjoying these romances years before the libros de caballerías reached the height of their popularity in Spain. Hundreds of contributions to the genre are still in print today and available in numerous translations. Given this reality, it seems highly suspect that this romance, penned by a woman, and of excellent quality, is not found on the shelves next to other texts of the genre. Cristalián, despite what scholars of the genre have erroneously posited, was not an obscure text in sixteenth-century Spain. Bookstore and print-shop inventories of its time list numerous copies of Bernal's romance in bound book form, which confirm that Cristalián was circulating for at least sixty years. The purpose of this dissertation is two-fold. In order for Cristalián to be included in conversations of any nature, it must be made available. This transcription of Book I and II seeks to accomplish that. Secondly, current scholarship must re-imagine erroneous constructions of sixteenth-century reader's preferences. These prevalent constructions have often excluded noteworthy contributions to literature, especially those written by women. My aim is to redress this imbalance by analyzing Beatriz Bernal's written text and her writing strategies. The first three sections of the accompanying study more thoroughly address the challenges facing women writers in sixteenth-century Spain while also considering issues of literacy, reader preferences, and text distribution of the period. The last sections of the study are devoted specifically to the chivalric genre, and to Bernal's exemplary romance, Cristalián de España. Also included in the appendix are woodcuts from both Castilian editions, the proemio from the second edition, the chapter rubrics from Book I and II, and an index of characters from the narration. / Spanish